COLOR TEST; Where Whites Draw the Line

By MARCUS MABRY

Published: June 8, 2008

CORRECTION APPENDED

How black is too black?

Millions of African-Americans celebrated Barack Obama's historic victory, seeing in it a reflection -- sudden and shocking -- of their own expanded horizons. But whether Mr. Obama captures the White House in November will depend on how he is seen by white Americans. Indeed, some people argue that one of the reasons Mr. Obama was able to defeat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was that a large number of white voters saw him as ''postracial.''

In other words, Mr. Obama was black, but not too black.

But where is the line? Does it change over time? And if it is definable, then how black can Mr. Obama be before he alienates white voters? Or, to pose the question more cynically, how black do the Republicans have to make him to win?

Social observers say a common hallmark of African-Americans who have achieved the greatest success, whether in business, entertainment or politics -- Oprah Winfrey, Magic Johnson and Mr. Obama -- is that they do not convey a sense of black grievance.

Clearly, Mr. Obama understands this. Until his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, forced race into the political debate, Mr. Obama rarely dwelt on it. He gave his groundbreaking speech on race only in response to the Wright controversy.

Indeed, after he effectively won the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, he left it to the media to point out the racial accomplishment, and the relative he thanked most emotively was the woman who raised him: his white grandmother.

There is a reason for this. Race is one of the most contentious issues in American society, and, as with many contentious issues, Americans like to choose the middle path between perceived extremes. ''In many ways, Obama is an ideal middle way person -- he is just as white as he is black,'' said Alan Wolfe, a political science professor at Boston College.

John McWhorter, who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, put it more bluntly: ''White people are weary of the kinds of black people who are dedicated to indicting whites as racists. So, to be 'too black' is to carry an air about you that whites have something to answer for.''

That was the root of Mr. Obama's Jeremiah Wright problem. Mr. Wright spewed exactly the kind of angry racial repudiation that many whites associate with black leaders.

Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, argues that the one arena where black grievance is acceptable is in music, particularly in hip-hop, where an estimated 70 percent of listeners are white. But the generation exposed to hip-hop, mostly under 40, are part of what Mr. Patterson calls a growing ''ecumenical'' American culture that is unselfconsciously multiracial.

This Obama Generation came of age in the post-civil-rights age when color, though still relevant, had less impact on what one read, listened to or watched. It was the common crucible of popular culture, he said, that forged a truly American identity, rather than the ''salad bowl'' analogy cherished by diversity advocates.

Mr. Obama's campaign so de-emphasized race that for most of the 17-month nomination contest much of the news media became obsessed with the question of whether he was ''black enough'' to win black votes.

Most African-American Democrats were for Hillary Clinton early on, until voters in Iowa proved to them that whites would support a black candidate.

Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. said that Mr. Obama, unlike the immediate successors of Martin Luther King Jr., understood the importance of language and the need to frame social debate in a way less likely to alienate whites.

''In the absence of Martin Luther King,'' he said, ''I think the void was filled by Stokely Carmichael, James Bevel and Jesse Jackson,'' who did not use language as well. ''With all respect to my father, 40 years later, this is the first time we have gotten back to a very thoughtful and careful approach to language.''

But a crucial difference between Dr. King and Mr. Obama, said the King biographer Taylor Branch, was that Dr. King sought to point out hypocrisy and shame white people into changing the system.

It was not simply framing and language choice that has helped Mr. Obama reach white people. He is genuinely of a different place and time than the generation of black leaders forged in the civil rights struggle. His story is, in part, an immigrant's story, devoid of the particular wounds that descendants of American slaves carry.

His father was a black Kenyan and his mother a white American. His mixed-race heritage is less discomfiting to whites, Mr. McWhorter said, than the more common source of black Americans' mixed-race blood: the miscegenation of slavery.

Mr. Obama's generation of black political leaders have benefited from the gains of the civil rights movement, and are now attempting to broaden them. They include Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark; Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Washington; Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts; and former Representative Harold Ford Jr. from Tennessee. They attended top schools, often in the Ivy League and often law school as well, and began their public-service careers in community organizing rather than in national civil rights organizations.

So far, only Mr. Obama and Mr. Patrick have won offices that required large numbers of white voters to support them.

Mr. Ford made a run for the United States Senate, but fell short -- thanks, in part, to suggestive ads by his opponent that featured a white actress.

Correction: June 15, 2008, Sunday
An article last Sunday about the attitudes of white people toward black leaders misidentified the source of suggestive ads attacking Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee in his run for the United States Senate in 2006. They were produced by the Republican National Committee -- not his opponent, Bob Corker.